Expelled: New movie exposes persecution of anti-Darwinists

Last October, in a move that revived memories of Stalinistic censorship, the Council
of Europe voted to encourage member countries to ban the teaching of creationism
as a scientific discipline. (See When will Europe wake up?). The Council’s Parliamentary Assembly declared:
‘If we are not careful, creationism could become a threat to human rights.’
In stark contrast, the reality on academic campuses around the world is that evolutionary
orthodoxy is already threatening human rights, as a new movie is about to show.
This major feature film, revealing the academic censorship of intelligent design
theory, is to be released in the Northern Hemisphere spring of 2008.

The controversial movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, is a documentary
that will expose how the Darwinist hierarchy has closed ranks against the rise of
intelligent design, a theory that opposes evolution and says that a Designer is
responsible for life. Some leading scientists have lost their jobs for expressing
dissident views on the origins of life.

The film shows that in this particular field, science is far from being a free and open exploration of the truth and is, in fact, a closed book.

Expelled uncovers the persecution of educators and scientists who are being
denied tenure, and even fired in some cases, for their belief in the evidence for
design in nature, challenging the idea that life is a result of random chance and
evolution.

The movie is made with the 2008 American elections in mind, and intelligent design
vs evolution has already become an issue—with candidates taking sides.
It is the brainchild of software developer Walt Ruloff, who has also funded the
movie. He made his fortune by selling his software to Microsoft in the early 1990s.
Then he discovered the intelligent design controversy. He says he was stunned ‘both
by the arrogance and brutality of the Darwinist establishment, and the lack of solid
scientific evidence for their views.’

The film has already received endorsements from high-profile Christian figures like
Luis Palau, Charles Colson, Michael Medved and J.I. Packer. The filmmakers, Premise
Media, plan to use viral marketing to ensure that Expelled reaches students.
The campaign is directed by Motive Entertainment, the company behind the grass roots
promotions for Hollywood blockbusters such as The Passion of the Christ
and The Chronicles of Narnia.

Unlike many documentaries, Expelled doesn’t just talk to people representing
one side of the story. The film confronts evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins,
author of The God Delusion, influential biologist and atheist blogger PZ
Myers, and Eugenie Scott, head of the anti-creationist lobby group, National Center
for Science Education. The creators of Expelled crossed the globe over
a two-year period, interviewing scores of scientists, doctors, philosophers and
public leaders. The result is a startling revelation of the way in which freedom
of thought and freedom of inquiry have been expelled from high schools, universities
and research institutions.

Photo <www.expelledthemovie.com>

The star of the film is Hollywood actor Ben Stein, who is also a lawyer, an economist,
a former presidential speechwriter, author and social commentator. In the film,
he discovers biologists, astronomers, chemists and philosophers who have had their
reputations destroyed and their careers ruined by a scientific establishment that
allows absolutely no dissent from evolution.

For example, Stein meets Richard Sternberg, a double Ph.D. biologist who allowed
a peer-reviewed research paper describing the evidence for intelligence in the universe
to be published in the scientific journal Proceedings. Not long after publication,
officials from the National Center for Science Education and the Smithsonian Institution,
where Sternberg was a research fellow, began a coordinated smear and intimidation
campaign to get the promising young scientist expelled from his position. This attack
on scientific freedom was so egregious that it prompted a congressional investigation.
See The Smithsonian/Sternberg
controversy.

Stein also meets astrophysicist Guillermo Gonzalez, who was denied tenure at Iowa
State University in spite of his extraordinary record of achievement. Gonzalez made
the mistake of documenting the design he has observed in the universe. See
Darwinian thought police strike again. There is also Caroline Crocker, a
brilliant biology teacher at George Mason University who was forced out of the university
for briefly discussing problems with Darwinian theory, and for telling the students
that some scientists believe there is evidence of design in the universe. The list
goes on and on.

Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead,
no matter what the implications are.—Ben Stein, star of Expelled.

‘Big Science in this area of biology has lost its way,’ says Stein.
‘Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it
may lead, no matter what the implications are. Freedom of inquiry has been greatly
compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. It’s
anti-the whole concept of learning.’

Walt Ruloff, Co-Executive Producer, says,

‘The incredible thing about Expelled
is that we don’t resort to manipulating our interviews for the purpose of
achieving the “shock effect,” something that has become common in documentary film these days.

‘Premise Media took on this difficult mission because we believe the greatest
asset of humanity is our freedom to explore and discover truth.’

Even since the film was made, another case of censorship in American universities
has come to light. In September, Baylor University took offline the Evolutionary
Informatics Laboratory website that had been administered by Robert Marks, Distinguished
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor, because the administration
claimed there were anonymous complaints linking the lab to intelligent design.

This is the third instance in which Baylor University has restricted free speech
and punished a faculty member because of their views on intelligent design. In 2000,
the University administration caved in to pressure from Darwinian activists demanding
they shut down the Michael Polanyi Research Center, established in part to do research
on intelligent design theory. In 2006, legal scholar Francis Beckwith was denied
tenure by Baylor administrators in part because of his writings supporting the constitutionality
of teaching intelligent design. The Board of Regents reversed that decision and
Beckwith was granted tenure, but only after a long public battle.

Casey Luskin, a spokesman for Discovery Institute, America’s leading think
tank on intelligent design, says: ‘There is a troubling pattern of scientists
and scholars at Baylor University coming under attack for questioning evolution.
The freedom of scientists, teachers and students to question Darwin is coming under
increasing attack by people that can only be called Darwinian fundamentalists. ‘What
has happened to Professor Marks is censorship, pure and simple.’ (See also
US Congressional leader
castigated for creation comments.)

Dr Marks has gone the extra mile in trying to accommodate any legitimate concerns
Baylor administrators may have had about his evolutionary informatics website, even
agreeing to put a disclaimer on the site making clear that it represented his views
as a faculty member, not the university as a whole. But Baylor administrators have
now spurned Marks’ efforts to accommodate them, apparently reneging on a compromise
brokered by Marks’ attorney.

But scientists who support intelligent design shouldn’t be surprised at their
predicament. Before the particular subset of anti-Darwinism known as ‘intelligent
design’ arrived on the scene, creationist scientists had been systematically
persecuted for decades, and still are today. For example, when Dr Marcus Ross, a
young palaeontologist at the University of Rhode Island, submitted his doctoral
thesis on mosasaurs—giant extinct marine reptiles—he was ‘outed’
as a young-Earth creationist. The revelation, in The New York Times, sparked
an impassioned debate about whether his views should preclude him from his chosen
profession. (Dr Ross was interviewed in CMI’s Creation magazine in
December 2007.)

The fact that he is a brilliant scientist, whose research is described by colleagues
as impeccable, seemed irrelevant to the orthodox Darwinists, who called for him
to be sacked simply because he expresses different scientific views to theirs.

Eugenie Scott, executive director of the US National Centre for Science Education,
favoured a hard line against Dr Ross because of the suspicion that he would use
his doctorate ‘to miseducate the public’.

Is academic censorship also taking place in the UK? If anything, it’s probably
worse on Darwin’s home patch. Mark Pickering, head of student ministries at
the Christian Medical Fellowship, says that there is systematic bias in the scientific
world against intelligent design: ‘I have academic colleagues who do not yet
have tenure who cannot own up to their professors that they have sympathy with intelligent
design because that would be the end of their career. This is despite them already
proving themselves as good scientists’ (Student British Medical Journal,
June 07).

In December 2006, The Guardian reported that an influential group of academics
were demanding a change in the law to ensure UK scholars are given complete freedom
of speech in universities. More than 60 educators from Academics for Academic Freedom
called for laws to be extended to ensure that academics are free to ‘question
and test received wisdom, and to put forward unpopular opinions’.

In today’s political climate it is harder than ever for academics to defend
open debate.—Academics for Academic Freedom

A statement on the AFAF website says:

‘In today’s political climate it is harder than ever for academics to
defend open debate. Restrictive legislation, and the bureaucratic rules and regulations
of government quangos and of universities themselves, have undermined academic freedom.

The very fact that such a campaign is necessary seems to prove that free debate
and research in the UK are under threat. Richard Dawkins has publicly called for
Andy McIntosh,
Professor of Thermodynamics at Leeds to be sacked simply for claiming evolutionary theory is wrong. (Note: the title ‘professor’ is given only to the highest academic rank at UK and British Commonwealth universities, unlike in American universities.)

Howard Taylor, chaplain at Heriot–Watt University in Edinburgh, says: ‘At
Caltech University in Los Angeles, a lecturer has complained that the scientific
hierarchy is behaving like the “mother church” of the Middle Ages and
intimidating those of a different view.’

While the lecturer was talking about scientific dissent on global warming, it appears
that the comparison is just as applicable to evolution. It seems the scientific
establishment has nullified the Royal Society’s motto: ‘Nullius in verba’1 , which refers to open, unprejudiced,
uninhibited inquiry and unstifled debate.